FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows

As a general principle I believe this kind of data should either be rigorously analyzed in depth or analyzed as little as possible. That's why I originally posted raw numbers: I think raw numbers are the only responsible way to do this kind of internet forum surface-level analysis. It's too easy to trick intentionally or unintentionally with statistics.

It's obvious the US is an outlier from the raw numbers, there's no need to get fancy.

I chose the metric of police killings carefully. In a non-tiny democracy with a police violence problem there are enough that it's not dominated by outliers, but few enough that it's feasible for a few reporters to spot check the data. They're also notable enough a large portion of the incidents generate some publicly available commentary, often in local press.

(In non-tiny democracies without a police killing problem it might be dominated by outliers, but the raw numbers make the fact killings are rare obvious)

In the US, for example, the FBI collects statistics even they acknowledge are poor quality. The Washington Post has a project to monitor publicly available information and enter police shootings into a database, and they generally find publicly available proof of about twice as many shootings as are entered into the FBI database.

The main takeaway I wanted people to take from the data I posted is that there's nearly no country like the US close to it. Either way you read Malta & Luxembourg that's true, so there's no need to get fancy (and I think further analyzing that single stat without country-specific expertise would be questionably responsible).

I thought about saying I expected underreporting from the less democratic poorer countries but I decided I didn't want to spend the time reading their methodology to be confident in that. It's possible they've already attempted to correct for that, possibly even too much in the other way. The definition of police is also complex: Whether a unit is police or military is often historical chance.

Here's Vox on Travis Campbell's research:

> Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.

Source: https://www.vox.com/22360290/black-lives-matter-protest-crim...

Here's Harvard's Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi

> We estimate that these [police shooting protests] caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.

Source: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...

Note that these are both nationwide studies. I'm not sure what you mean by "cherrypicking years that seem significant to me", but yeah, looking at policing and crime before and after BLM protests seems pretty germane to understanding the effect those protests have on policing and crime.

> you're taking a data source that is already known and acknowledged to be flawed by the publisher

I think it's more likely that crime researchers better understand the limits of crime data sources than you do, and they probably aren't as lazy as you propose. But by all means, publish your rebuttal (and please link it here so I can read it)!

> You would have a great career in TV journalism!

Tragically, I have a face for radio. :/